After the Dance
by ninety6tears
Summary: You don't lose control," his father says to him. "That's why you don't win." Kara/Lee


Shoulders, blades of the back, legs, Kara Thrace in a dress. It is like a fierce crimson moon wearing some other planet's glistening oceans just because it frakking felt like it. She makes Lee feel thirteen years old and stupid just looking at her, rocking the eyes up like she knows, and she knows.

The world becomes hands when you think you might be falling in love. It becomes eyes and ears looking and waiting for a way to the fingers, mind wandering for a way the rules give you possession of them, just the hands and the way that they move and the way that they might move over yours.

When Lee dances with Kara he is actually surprised, when they swing and clutch in the buzzy fluff of the jazz, that he has not felt the in-between of the fingers, has never brushed close enough to the shape of her ribs; he wonders why and he should not ask himself and yet he wonders what else, what else, what else.

But he contemplates and calculates the opening of the floodgates, of course, instead of throwing downstream. She is only a little drunk and he will swear later that she was both ready to leave and holding his arm when his dad, smiling over all the "I don't think I'm ever getting to bed tonight," will offer him some restless company.

Lee half-jokingly asks Kara if she'd like to spot him in the gym. She smirks, adjusts her skirt which has gotten slightly tangled between her legs, and shakes her head: "Clearly you're not used to the dress," indicating that strangely new thing once again that is her body. He thinks he's about to say he could definitely get used to it, but he thinks too much.

Kara Thrace in a dress is not even justified being called a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Somewhere the very gods are saying, "Get a load of this." Because they themselves have never seen whatever is down, up, and under all the thin blue; not just a bare sight for the showers, but the particular glowing anomaly, the Kara that is Kara underneath a gown on an evening that's forgotten about the battles.

She gives it to somebody else.

This will bruise just as bad as the punch that lands Lee smack on the floor that morning, will make the room suddenly spin brain-tossed and raging before his mind can even lock onto what's happening and what it means.

"You don't lose control," his father says to him. "That's why you don't win."

.

.

.

.

She catches herself just once or twice imagining the way it could have or would have happened. That whole day was the kind when she would've pretended to be more drunk than she was, clutching to his side and laughing until maybe she would have tiredly leaned back into the wall in some secluded corner or hallway and maybe he would have followed her body to the sound of a chuckle when their lips joined. And she'd be pinned, right there, hands too slow at this time of night to give a damn except for how the clasps come undone. Gods know what the morning after would have been like; probably, though, they wouldn't have gone to bed. They'd keep the evening in them for as long as they could, out here where things don't look like a different shape in new light because there is no light. There would just be the shouting of the morning, and hangovers propping them lazy against each other until some knowing and slightly incredulous smiles would glance over the afternoon card game. There would be ten different answers to "Why not?" but neither would ask because it would be fitfully, gloriously too late, the world unpeeled but exactly the same.

And then there is one day that she feels like her bones are made of water and she boards a ship not even knowing he's going to be there, and some seconds after having to fall grinning straight into his arms, Lee kisses her. Not like a lover who actually has some business kissing you or like a brother who realizes what he's doing but like someone who just has to. And the moment drops so fast because Kara is all too thrown off by the fact that Lee just did something without thinking about it. So she has to tease him for it, and he has to tease her back.

But the thing is, if he had just told her to shut the frak up and kissed her again. . .

.

.

.

.

This is what happens when Kara, determined and rough above the shuddering angry gut, is taunting, bucking, pulling, spitting until Lee seethes open and straps the gloves on and gets into the ring after her. When their resentment jounces them up and down and then shoots out their fists again and again, it is desperate, futile repossession of opportunity. Padded fists coil with the snap of all the words that were almost said, and blows burn with all the times she only punished him for taking the chance. And she knows. She knows it would be fair if she walked away with nine broken bones and him with nothing but a scratch, but she is still stuck in that child that wants to be fought for tooth-and-nail so that whatever happens is not her fault. He's going to have to claw her ribs open and crawl inside so that it's too late for her, before she realizes that all she wants, all she ever wants is him there, eager loose fire inside her where she doesn't usually feel anything but the engine war hum.

When they end scraped up and bleeding but also somehow wrapped around each other like there's no one else in the whole court, both of them become suddenly aware with such closeness of how bare she is. Her torso, sweaty and heaving, seems now delicate and pale so pressed against him, and Kara is oddly reminded of that night she had the nearly unexplainable inclination to look as pretty as she possibly could - and when she remembers the look that Lee had on his face to see her in that dress she suddenly realizes all of the damage that it did. This is when it comes out of her, a nearly hysterical little laugh that sounds at once self-amused, relieved, and a little like the beginnings of exhausted sobbing.

On the way to the lockers she bites and rips the fastener off of her right wrist, then left, and from under the gloves come these new, sweat-shined, terrified hands.

More or less following all her steps, Lee is laughing with her still when later he's rinsing at one of the sinks and she is muttering from the showers. Then he grabs his towel and strips down and in the same way that he just hugged her close in front of the entire crowd of stragglers, he now, in front of nobody, steals into the shower stall as naturally as if no one was already in there.

She turns and smiles, looking hardly surprised, but not without the slightest hesitance; her face is half hidden by her hand absently nursing her wounded nose.

He steps closer and says, "Let me see." His hands frame the cheekline of her face, thumbs poking gently at the tender areas. She winces slightly. "Yeah, it's pretty busted."

Kara scoffs, wrings out a rag and starts to scrub a pathetic little patch of blood off of his face. "You're not going to start apologizing, are you?" She steps closer, arms brushing together.

With a low chuckle, he lets his head rock down to hers, and he says, gently, "When have you ever gotten my pity?" before he lets his lips brush down her nose.

The water courses between their hushed faces, slickens their hair into lapping against each other's foreheads as she crooks her head up just slightly, letting his mouth fall lower, lower, and when they kiss there is the grey taste of water seeping in the crevices of the open lips; once it swallows their bodies are clutched and joined in the same stream, in a kind of giving up, a triumphant drowning.


End file.
